We have an event wiki page with all of the details here. You can sign up to attend by leaving your details on this wiki page or if you are not comfortable leaving your details on a public URL then just drop me a mail. Spaces are limited so please don't leave it until the last minute. Please sign up on the page rather than just commenting in the forum as I need to provide a list of people to the venue on the day.

We need your help!

Although most of the practical details are in place there is plenty the Umbraco community can do to support this event.

Give a presentation

If you think that you have a compelling talk/presentation to give at the event, please leave some details on this wiki page or contact me by email.

Tweet/Blog/Email your friends

Be sure to let any UK Umbraco users know about the event by sending links to the wiki pages above. Use the hashtag #umbracouk.

Non Umbracians are welcome there will be plenty of beginner focused material. If you know any CMS professionals who may be interested in Umbraco get them to come along.

Come along prepared to participate

We don't want the meetup to be a bunch of guys standing up and talking we want to have group sessions and may be some open space. Come along prepared to speak up, with questions and topics around Umbraco in mind.

Finally

Without community partcipation this event will just be some tech guys in a room. By contributing to the wiki pages above and throwing your suggestions into the ring we can make it something much more than that.

Following on from the results there is now likely to be a meetup in London on Thursday 6th August 2009.

The meetup only happens if people commit to coming and we find some quality people to talk/present.

The day will run from 11.30am until 4.30pm - moving to a pub/bar after 4.30 for informal drinks networking. you can just attend the drinks if you don't want to do a whole day.

Please support this event by blogging and tweeting a link to the our.umbraco.org page, signing up to attend here (just add your name to the wiki page), and most importantly contributing to the agenda. You can contibute by either emailing me a topic that you'd like to present or listing it on the topics wiki page. You can also edit the agenda on this wiki page.

I cannot stress enough that this is everyone's event. I am just getting the ball rolling here by setting a date and a venue. The people will ultimately make or break the day. Please get involved!

The page still looks the same to any passing search engines though.

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Here is a summary of the new features and enhancements:

• Added a clear button to remove a stored location.
• Moved all CSS from user control to external CSS file to allow user to alter map appearance.
• Added support for default map locations on a per domain basis.
• GUI based configuration of datatype, no need to edit XML config files any more.
• Config GUI can be added to Umbraco dashboard.
• General code/markup cleanup.

For me, the datatype is now pretty much feature complete. If you'd like to see anything else added, you can submit a request in the package feature request forum. Bugs can be reported in the package Bug report forum.

Over the next few weeks I'll blog more on displaying maps on the front end of your web site and share a little more information on calculating the distance between stored points.

I'm not necessarily committing  to organise a meet up here, just trying to get a sense for where/when and what should happen according to the UK community.

As the title says, this is a brief summary. I just sat down and wrote up all of my mental notes from the conference and I realise that I have more to do than I honestly have time for. I've prioritised everything so that the commitments I made in open space sessions are top of the list.

Unfortunately for me Umbraco makes less than 5% of my professional commitments so time is very precious but I've left codegarden this year vowing to increase that 5% because I've realised that I want to work with Umbraco a lot more.

One of the ways to achieve this increase in Umbraco time is commercial packages. I attended an open space session on integrating the three current package repositories - store, our.umbraco and the original package repository - and out of this the minutes show that I have a few actions. First I aim to document some best practices for creating commercial packages and secondly I'll release my framework application that allows you to quickly write some license providers that work with the Umbraco store by implementing some .net interfaces.

Some may argue that by promoting commercial packages I'm not really entering the spirit of the whole Umbraco and open source movement but my answer is simple. If I had an employer subsidising my Umbraco development then everything that I created would be free. Unfortunately that is just not the case. I'll still continue to release free Umbraco packages alongside my commercial offerings.

Continuing my focus on working more with Umbraco I attended open space sessions on Umbraco support and Team development and at other sessions I got the answers from the core team that I needed in order to try and present Umbraco as a viable option for my larger financial services clients.

I've made a commitment to work more with Umbraco this year. I've set myself certain personal goals that I will asses on a regular basis to see if what I am trying to achieve is working.

So that was my personal codegarden experience. Some other highlights for me were:

• Launch of our.umbraco.org proving that Umbraco love their community
• Putting faces to the names of all of those people (let's do a UK meet soon).
• Discovering that I love open space. It isn't just for conference organisers who can't be bothered!
• Great organic lunches and a fantastic venue that encouraged creativity.

A couple of other points from the keynote that I can't really leave out:

• Umbraco 4.1 will be a native .net 3.5 application, with a few interesting new features.
• Umbraco 5 will be a rewrite using asp.net MVC and not backwards compatible with previous releases.
• Umbraco 4.1 will be stable and supported post release of Umbraco 5.

So that was it codegarden. Thanks guys. See you all again next year I hope.

I'm going to get on to my to do list now. Watch this space.

The screencast below shows some work I've been doing in automatically extracting metadata from documents when they are uploaded to the Umbraco media section.

HINT: You can make the screencast full screen.

The suggestions that Tommy and Hanako came up with look great so I thought I'd repost them here in case anyone else is spending a couple of extra days in Copenhagen.

First up some suggestions from Tommy:

Guide sites:

http://www.visitcopenhagen.com/tourist (main tourist site when visiting Cph)

http://www.aok.dk/ (unfortunately mostly in Danish - but a main site for testing restaurant, café's etc. The have all sorts of rankings like best value-for-money, best brunch, best gourmet etc. - look in this page for an overview on danish). "AOK anbefaler" means "Recommended by AOK"

Tourist sites:

Canal Tours (nice boat trips in the Copenhagen canals)

Strøget (shopping street, pedestrians only)

Tivoli Gardens (nice and quite old amusement park, also nice at night)

Nyhavn (old houses, restaurants, pubs, old harbor)

Amalienborg (Royal palace)

A lot of the public museums are free, as far as I remember.

Travel Info:

Copenhagen is not really big, so walking around is easy. Busses/ferry-busses, S-trains and metro is also convenient within Copenhagen - the same tickets goes for all public transportation. Consider buying a 10-ticket card or special tourist tickets if you plan do travel a lot.

Rejseplanen (travelling I Denmark, including S-train, trains, busses, metro etc.)

Shopping:

Strøget (great shopping streets, pedestrians only, shopping. Check out the neightboring streets also)

Fields (indoor mall)

Fisketorvet (indoor mall)

Dining:

Generally there is a lot of restaurants around Strøget, Kgs. Nytorv, St.Kongensgade, Bredgade, Nyhavn. Here's a few (top-restaurants not included, but I can give a few advices here also if you are interested). I'm working close to Kgs. Nytorv, so that's mainly where I use restaurants:
L'Altro (great Italian restaurant, loads of small dishes, a bit corny interior but great food, reasonable prices)

Oubæk (close to Kgs. Nytorv, great French food, mid-price)

Le Sommelier (well known cph restaurant and wine bar - mid/upper prices)

Zeleste (at Kgs.Nytorv, nice lunch, reasonable prices, small carte)

Wok Shop (at Kgs. Nytorv, great thai food, nice prices)

Perchs Tea Room (tea house)

Nørrebro Bryghus (nice homebrewed beer, food, mid-price)

Next, some suggestions from Hanako:

Some antique shops:
http://www.trianglenantik.dk/index.php?page=1 

They have lots of 50s-70s interior and kitchen stuff.

http://www.mosterpips.dk/ 

They have very cute toys, cups, furniture etc for kids as well as stuff for grown ups.
Kids boutique:

http://www.cremedelacremealaedgar.dk/index.php This shop is very famous and popular. The owner buys old textiles from France mainly and remake clothes and accessories with new materials and design. very cute.

Cafes and restaurants:
Riccos is very popular among local people and they do very good coffee.

http://copenhagen.unlike.net/locations/303344-Ricco-s
Your wife might really like this place: http://www.tea-time.dk/

Very popular restaurant in Vesterbro.  http://89.221.175.146/cofoco.php
Their Italian restaurant brunch called Vespa seems also good.

Cafe Hovedtelegrafen . I don't have website link for this cafe. This is at the top of the Post museum? The open sandwiches are very reasonable and you can also enjoy good view.

http://www.madklubben.info/
I found this also in official tourism website.

They say "At Madklubben a three course menu is offered at DKK 200. In July 2008 the people behind the popular restaurant Madklubben opened their second restaurant and named it quite naturally, Den Anden (The Second One). A modern rendition of a Parisian bistro deluxe. "

Restaurant Olsen. One of the most famous restaurants in Copenhagen apparently.
Ved Stranden 18, 1061 Kobenhavn K
better to book a table at least a day before
tel: 3314-6400
Lunch is from 115dk
3 course dinner is from 295dk

For those of you who haven't used my Umbraco trials site, it allows you to create a hosted installation of Umbraco in a single click. There are no limitations on the install, you have full admin access and can install packages as you wish. The trials expire after a short period and are useful for showing someone Umbraco for the first time or evaluating a package that you don't wish to install into your production environment without testing.

The Umbraco trials site has been relatively successful to date serving up more than 300 trials to more than 200 users.

Now, back to trying to prepare some stuff for codegarden. See you all next week.

An Introduction:

The day was presented in a slick style with an even slicker accompanying audio/visual presentations - I counted six AV technicians seated behind a black screen at the back of the room. The audience was a mix of technical, sales and marketing people from Autonomy Interwoven partners and customers. The tone was very marketing based - the whole day was really about how to to increase revenue through your website using Autonomy products. A large proportion of the audience wanted something different, in an interactive vote at the end of the day 38% of the audience voted that they'd like to see "more technical content" at the next gearup, twice the percentage of any other option.

Throughout the day I felt that the confidence of some of the presenters bordered on arrogance we were told that "Interwoven invented web content management" and there were constant references to Autonomy technology being market leading with "no competitors". Interestingly some of those who had worked with IDOL referred to it as "dated" and "clunky" in private conversations. I'm yet to get my teeth stuck into IDOL personally so I'll reserve judgement but we were consistently told throughout the day what the future of content was and how certain practices were dated. On this subject I feel compelled to make a point.

A little rant:

It is extremely hard to sit and be schooled about the "future" by an organisation whose corporate website and developer support site fail to implement some very basic web standards and best practices. Validating your pages against your declared DTD, Providing RSS Feeds and SEO friendly URLs are just a few extremely basic items that a leading ECM vendor should take the time to implement. Oh, and you can't search the developer site for key TeamSite terminology like DCR, XML and TPL because they are too short. They've been aware of this for years and it never changes.

What I learned:

A few quick bullet points:

• TeamSite 7 and LiveSite 7 to ship this year - focus will be on more IDOL integration.
• LiveSite runtime available for .net platform.
• Autonomy pledged continued support for all Interwoven products (including MetaTagger).
• Autonomy have doubled the number of trained support staff.

IDOL:

We were introduced to IDOL server (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). TeamSite 6.7.2 SP1 ships with IDOL server and from what I understand all content that is entered into TeamSite is also consumed by IDOL via some kind of connector. IDOL is able to analyse unstructured content from a variety of sources - audio, video, email and many more - and "understand" it's meaning. There are lots of technologies in play here - OCR, speech to text, facial recognition to name a few - but the high level concept is that you can throw just about anything at IDOL (with minimal configuration) and it understands.

Let me explain a little about "understands". Like the rest of the day the notion of content being understood was reasonably vague but a lot of emotive language was used. IDOL can gauge sentiment, mood, intimacy and so on. My interpretation is that Autonomy are trying to tell us that their software is smart and it does all of that classification, summarisation, stemming and synonym processing without you having to think. They were also trying to tell us that it does more than that, an example given was how a search for dogs could yield results on Labradors and how IDOL may have a notion that dogs are used by the police. Good stuff maybe, but a bit too high level for my liking.

The demonstrations that we were given were unclear as to how data is retrieved from IDOL though I got the impression that SitePublisher components are shipped with the new version of TeamSite which somehow query the IDOL repository. I was also left unclear as to where IDOL sits within my environment - on the CMS server, in my production environment - and what kind of hardware resources it requires. I'm also wondering where the revenue comes from - If we get IDOL server for free what do we have to buy? Are we getting hooked on this new technology first and the paid for stuff that we can't resist gets brought into play later?

To be honest it was a bit of an information overload with IDOL, we saw it create tag clouds of user sentiment, create user profiling, recognise people words and video and I must admit it left me wanting to try it out. One point of note was that we were shown a scenario where a customer dialling in to a call centre casually mentioned the Chicago cubs and was presented with an application form for a Cubs credit card the next time they visited the company website. This may be fine in the US, I'd be a bit careful about that kind of behaviour in Europe though - perhaps do some reading up ob PHORM.

There was also an impressive demo of MediaBin combined with Autonomy Virage - now one product -which was able to automatically transcribe a video audio track. The demonstration ware pre-recorded. It would have been much more fun to see a video of one the presentations on the day fed into the software so we could see the actual real time results. Text to speech is still far from perfect and audio tracks which aren't clear and regional accents can still confuse the hell out of some systems. If Autonomy wanted to show us how powerful their software was they should have let a member of the audience talk to it.

Integrated Analytics:

Well no, not really. The new version of TeamSite allows you to view some analytical data *if* you are a Webtrends customer. To be honest it wasn't that impressive it was just a bunch of standard Webtrends reports linked to from the contentcenter GUI.

Optimost:

TeamSite 6.7.2 SP1 also has an optional (paid for) component that allows you to test different permutations of a web page in order to determine which was most successful - aka multi-variable testing - success is gauged by the user reaching a 'goal' page on your website. The permutations would be subtle copy or colour changes in your website and you are able to rule out specific permutations to gradually reach the 'winner' page. I wasn't sure about this personally as I didn't like the idea of an ever changing page and how this would affect it's page rank with search engines. There was no demonstration of how the test results are presented and whether it breaks users down by any demographics within the results, but I did speak to a user from British Airways who was very satisfied with the result that Optimost had yielded and he claimed that the optimisations that they had made had easily paid for the software in a very short space of time.

A few moans:

I didn't like the fact that the executive Q&A session wasn't opened up to the floor, we had to provide our questions on paper at the end of the first session and they were vetted over the following hour before the ones which were selected were asked to the company executives on stage. I also thought that each individual presentation could have been opened up to questions at the end, but each presenter finished up exited the stage and the next demonstration video kicked in.

In my opinion they could have easily lost a couple of sessions such as Toby Bell of Gartner, a presentation from Fidelity on how they built their new website and a Q&A on e-commerce with some executives of Autonomy Interwoven customers. I feel that these would have been much better replaced with more audience participation but then again Interwoven have always been quite a closed organisation and I hear that Autonomy are even more so. For the record I thought Toby Bell delivered a good presentation but it didn't relate specifically to any Autonomy Interwoven products.

To Conclude:

All in all it was an interesting day. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some of the technology that Autonomy are bringing to the Interwoven product suite. Unfortunately some of it will be forever out of my reach as they don't really do evaluations. There is a market for technical workshops where developers like me get our hands on this technology maybe these could run alongside gearup in future.

Claridges is a lovely hotel, lunch was fantastic and it was fun to catch up with some old colleagues, meet some new people and put faces to names of people that I knew by reputation.

I'd love to here some feedback from any other attendees. I'd love to here from Autonomy Interwoven to see whether they think I've been fair with my comments and particularly on whether they plan to address any of the basic issues with their corporate sites - I'm here and very willing to help if you want to be helped!

If what we saw yesterday is true IDOL Social Media Analysis will probably read, classify and derive the meaning and sentiment of my blog post and let someone at Autonomy know about it. For all I know it may even respond automatically!

I'm sure I've missed something, but then a day with so much detail is very difficult to summarise.